I rediscovered all the things I once loved and that Gnometook away from me piece by piece over the years.

I'm enjoying exploring again instead of bumping into boundaries that were never there before and are artificial anyway..

If the word *innovation* wasn't as slain as it is by this baldmonkey from redmond I'd say that the KDE people truly are the onlyones that deserve to be called innovative. (Except 4 the Mint dev guys)

The Activities concept has no equal on any desktop, just to name something.

The freedom the KDE Desktop offers, the beauty by which it presentsitself and it's sheer potential to be functional to the wishes of anyone,has no match on any Desktop.(Only the eComStation WorkplaceShell might be in the same league)

And really liking it has a lot of things I missed in other distro's.Has some features missing in other distro's like having my apps open the right size and orientation on my dual display setup.And finding the more I use it and liking some of the features not found on other Distro's

Tho still Love Mint Cinnamon and probably give it another go after 15 is released in May.As between the KDE & Cinnamon am quite impressed and donated a bit of Cash to Clem's ongoing Outstanding Releases..

They started with forking Ubuntu and as time went on they put theirown stamp, or, more accurately, the stamp of their users on the distro's they create.

Where Ubuntu is tied to the vision of Mark Shuttleworth, (which is not wrong at all),(just not applicable to a large group of users), the Mint Developers create what their audience want; they *listen*.(One of the things the Gnome peoples have yet to learn after all this time)

Being able to produce variations like KDE,XFCE,..., and so besides the main (Gnome . now MATE/Cinnamon) distro and still deliver quality work is a feat not to be underestimated. Actually it is proof that listening works and therefore subscribes the whole overall concept of sharing.

Enfin, before switching to KDE I evalueted Kubuntu and Mint-KDE and the last one won. Hands down. By far.

My only wish for now is LMDE-KDE since I suspect keeping on being based on Ubuntuis gonna pose probs somewhere in the future. The current LMDE effort is very cool butsplit among Gnome3/Cinnamon and Mate. KDE is very unifyng and will come to it's truepower when based on Debian with the Mint touch...

After spending some time with Nadia-KDE, on which I used KDE and XFCE, I learned a lot about theming and what is needed to blend KDE, Gtk2 and Gtk3 appsto have about the same appearance.While the KDE Desktop is truly awesome and XFCE is of a very sane design, the Kwinwindow-manager just doesn't cut is when compared to Compiz on my machine. (Dell Latitude D530 Laptop)Not performance wise and not feature wise.About the same goes for the Cinnamon window-manager, but it does do Scale and Expo quite nice,which I use for my task switching.

Then one day I reinstalled my LMDE system, that was still on Gnome2 with a mix of Mate stuffafter an unsuccessful upgrade attempt and found that MATE/Compiz was an unbeatablecombination for what I want. ** It is blazingly fast **Being a panel-junky I added XFCE panels, which are of a more sane design than Gnome2/MATE panels.I only use MATE panels for the top and the bottom; all my junky-panels are XFCE which I can dynamicallygenerate because they exist in plain xml files and not in some registry.

So, I kinda switched back and now I'm Mating...

Running LMDE with MATE/Compiz and XFCE panels.Added Cinnamon just to follow it's development. It's a very nice and clean Desktop.Planning on adding KDE later because I realy like it's activities feature where you can setupa work environment completely dedicated to a specific task.